Friday, January 7, 2011

About 3 weeks ago, I downloaded and installed Google Maps for my blackberry. I thought it was pretty cool when driving. A day or so later I noticed that my battery life dropped from 3 days to 1 day!! I didn’t use the phone any more than normal, but I had a significant decrease in battery life. Having to charge my phone every day was just plain bothersome.

I've have my phone a year now; maybe the battery was just getting old and not holding a charge anymore. I happened to have an unused battery from a warranty replacement that was less than 3 months old, so I decided to try the unused battery. I put the battery in and let it charge up. After a couple days use on the new battery, it still suffered the same issue, just 1 day battery life.

I lived with the problem for several weeks wondering what could have changed. I was texting just a couple days ago and noticed that the arrows in the upper right corner of the screen were indicating almost continual back and forth data access and I wasn’t actually do anything?!?! That’s when I remembered I installed google maps a couple weeks early. I went to my downloads and deleted Google maps. Deleting the application required a hard device reset. After removing the application I found it interesting that battery life was back up to 3 days again!!

A quick search on google using the following terms “google maps blackberry battery issues” listed a plethora of hits … must be a common problem.

The moral of the story is – Beware Google Maps Users – Google is tracking where you go and what you do! That is the only possible conclusion! My fiancé has an Android and Google Maps is a permanent install, meaning she can’t remove the application. Everyone I know who has a Droid complains of battery life… could this be the problem – mystery solved.